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Aaron Lyles
At fifteen, Aaron Lyles was publishing a snowboard magazine out of Southington, Connecticut. The local paper ran the headline "Teen is chairman of the 'board.'" The pun was tongue in cheek. The mistake underneath it was not.
In 1995, snowboarding still read as a joke to people who had never asked a snowboarder anything. Unserious. Not worth a real question. So nobody thought to ask where the stories were, or why a kid in Connecticut already had readers as far away as Australia and Japan.
The signal was traveling the whole time, across New England and then well past it, in small and stubborn ways. It was there. It just was not being heard.
He has spent every year since circling the same failure: institutions ask for a signal, then mishear it. They flatten the nuance, miss the ambition, and walk right past the thing already in motion.
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Sleepless Nights
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Days Off
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Rabbit Holes
(02)
The Why
Survey response rates have been collapsing for two decades. Pew Research Center tracked telephone participation falling from 36% in 1997 to 6% by 2018. The people who still answer tend to rush, choosing whatever ends the interaction fastest. The industry has a tidy word for this: satisficing. Aaron has a blunter one: design failure.
The fix was never better software. It took a different premise, grounded in behavioral science and consent-first design, and a stubborn conviction that how you ask matters as much as what you ask. Give people the right conditions and they will tell you everything. Not a form. Not a five-point scale. A conversation built on respect.
That conviction became Warren.
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The B-Side
Aaron built Nesolagus on purpose, not as a fallback. The path here was not linear. There were real collaborations early on, partnerships weighed, directions explored and set down. What survived all of it was clarity, and the resolve to protect it.
That is what solo actually means here. One person accountable for the standard, and a team built around every project to meet it. Each engagement is staffed to its nuance: experts brought in for the work, advisors who push back, collaborators who know what he does not. The shape of the team follows the work. The standard does not move.
He lives in Connecticut with his wife Samantha, a fashion designer and director whose work sits where rigor meets beauty. Their daughter Cru, named for a character in RAD, the 80s BMX cult film, is the center of everything. A miniature Schnauzer named Witty has opinions, and shares them.
The household runs on craft and stubbornness, creativity, imagination and adventure. So does the company.